Lasting Words

The words of rebellion:

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” Henry asked the delegates. The Second Virginia Convention was meeting in the Richmond church since Virginia’s royal governor Lord Dunmore, faithful to instructions from Britain, was preventing the House of Burgesses from convening for some months. Part of the reason seems to have been that this allowed legal authorization for the colony’s militia to lapse, theoretically leaving the colony unprotected — and therefore more vulnerable to British tyranny. It is always a prime goal of tyrants to try and ensure that the people are unarmed/unprotected. That, fortunately, did not succeed as the British hoped in the American colonies in 1775. Not everyone at the Convention was convinced that war was the answer, of course, though it is interesting that one of Henry’s auditors at the Convention was George Washington, who would go on to lead the Revolutionaries to victory. Other famed delegates included Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Harrison V. At the convention, Henry’s proposal to put Virginia “into a posture of Defence” was considered too provocative, too militaristic. Did the colonists really want war? So on March 23, lawyer and statesman Patrick Henry stood up and thundered forth a speech that would become one of the most famous in American history. “The questing before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery,” Henry stated bluntly. He left no gray area, no room for compromise. Great Britain had been ignoring or oppressing the colonies for years. At this point, it was either war or submission. The “illusions of hope” could not hide the “painful truth.”

As true now as it was then...